David Blair became Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in November 2011. He previously worked for the paper as Diplomatic Editor, Africa Correspondent and Middle East Correspondent.

Are our spymasters in the shadows becoming normal public figures?

Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6, spent most of his career in the Foreign Office, serving variously as Ambassador in Cairo and Britain’s representative in Baghdad immediately after the invasion. Unlike most intelligence chiefs, he has plenty of experience of dealing with the media – and that showed through during today’s committee hearing.

“Our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee,” said Sawers of the Snowden leaks. “Al-Qaeda is lapping it up.” With those words, I suspect he has written the headline for much of the coverage – and that he knew exactly what he was doing.

His counterparts from MI5 and GCHQ, meanwhile, gave the kind of performances you would expect from officials who, until recently, would never have dreamed of talking about their work on live TV.

Their aim was to drive home the possible damage that recent leaks of vast quantities of classified information can inflict. Both Andrew Parker of MI5 and Sir Iain Lobban of GCHQ made their case effectively enough, but without the sound bites and ready-made headlines that Sawers could probably recite in his sleep.

Lobban, in particular, got rather bogged down in his “needle-in-a-hayfield” analogy, before making the central point: GCHQ is not in the business of mass surveillance for the simple reason that it’s interested in the needles, not the surrounding hay. Contrary to the impression given by some leaks “we do not spend our time listening to the phone calls and reading the emails of the vast majority of the public,” said Lobban. “I don’t employ the kind of people who would do it,” he added. “If they were asked to snoop, I wouldn’t have the workforce – they’d leave the building.”

In the face of unprecedented publicity about their work, the spymasters have done something their predecessors would never have countenanced: they have made their case personally and on television. But these organisations still do not have what every other branch of government regards as essential, namely established media operations and formal spokespeople with public voices. The chiefs made their case in public because they do not employ people who could do it for them.

I wonder how much longer that situation will last? I suspect that before long, there will be some kind of formal media operation for the intelligence agencies. That may or may not be a good thing – personally I think probably not – but it now feels as if it will be inevitable.